Frog Music (21 page)

“Wouldn’t have credited that dandy man for a nurse,” Jenny remarks under her breath.

“I can’t do it—I’ve got to—” Blanche’s voice fractures, and she gestures down at the baby.

Jenny nods, and drains her glass in one. “Phew, it stinks in here. Let’s get out for some air.”

There’s nothing Blanche would like more, but she has P’tit to look after.

“High time he saw something of his hometown,” says Jenny, reading her mind.

She’s right, Blanche decides. They need some air. “Keep an eye on him, then, while I make myself presentable,” she says, parking P’tit on the floor, where he immediately starts to cry.

“Presentable for whom, pray tell?”

Jenny’s mocking line follows Blanche into the little lavatory, where she scrabbles in her bag for her rouge. She’s not going out without a bit of paint and a freshly pinned chignon, at least. The half-melted kohl keeps getting in her eye, so she blinks the flecks of black away.

When she emerges to choose a fluted wrapper from the trunk of clothes behind the sofa, she finds Jenny clapping for the baby. P’tit’s expression is grave, as if he’s listening for the melodic line in some almost inaudible symphony. But he is clapping along: slow, silent pats, palm to palm.

Blanche, dressed now, scoops P’tit up and follows Jenny toward the door. The strains of a melancholy violin rise from the bedroom.

“Ernest?” murmurs Jenny, eyebrows up.

“It soothes Arthur,” Blanche whispers.

“Wouldn’t soothe me, I’ll tell you that much.”

“Chut,”
she shushes her, with an appalled grin.

Jenny leaves her bicycle where it’s resting in the stairwell, and they step out onto Sacramento Street. The air’s as baking hot as ever, but more breathable than in the apartment—or maybe it just seems that way because Blanche hasn’t been out in days. The gaslit sidewalks are as crowded as if it’s broad daylight.

“How long’s Arthur had it?” asks Jenny.

“Tomorrow’s the twelfth day,” says Blanche.

“The fever hasn’t come back?”

“No.”

“Still breathing easily?”

“I suppose.” Breathing’s about all Arthur can manage.

“The Chinese call them beautiful flowers.”

“What?”

“The blisters,” says Jenny. “To flatter the goddess, don’t you know—so she’ll spare them and move on.”

“Which goddess?”

“The smallpox goddess.”

“They’ve got a goddess of goddamn smallpox?” asks Blanche.

Suddenly they’re both giggling like children.

Blanche sobers fast. “The thing is, I heard from an iceman—and Ernest read it, somewhere too,” she adds, “that if a smallpox case is going to make it, you’ll know on the twelfth day, because the blisters start scabbing over.”

“When,”
says Jenny.

“What?” asks Blanche, confused.

“No need for ifs.
When
they scab over.”

Blanche gnaws her lip and tastes blood. “You haven’t seen Arthur.”

“Still, I say your fancy man’s going to come through.” Jenny spins a stick and catches it on the back of her hand. “He’s getting good care.”

“Not from me.” Guilt webbing in her throat.

“You’re keeping his son safe. He’ll understand.”

Blanche wishes she believed that.

“How about his eyes, are they white?”

“Brown,” answers Blanche, startled.

“The whites of them,” Jenny clarifies.

Blanche is too ashamed to admit that she hasn’t been close enough to Arthur to check his eyeballs.

“Most folks are surviving this, I heard, eyesight and all,” says Jenny. “Sometimes barely a mark on them.”

“I don’t care if Arthur ends up with a few
marks
,” Blanche snaps.

P’tit’s getting heavy; she should have thought to bring a shawl to tie him on her back or hip, the way country women do. Though, now that Blanche pictures it, she realizes she can’t bear the notion of looking like one of them. She’d rather shift him from shoulder to aching shoulder. It doesn’t seem to occur to Jenny to offer to carry him awhile. Sometimes it strikes Blanche that she might be better off with an ordinary friend.

A pungent reek makes her glance sideways down the next alley. After a stall where two men in long aprons are gutting fish, there’s a run of narrow buildings with those sliding door panels that display the blank faces of
mui jai
, Chinese girls standing ready for hire. “I wonder what they charge,” says Blanche with professional curiosity.

“Don’t you know the rhyme? Two bittee lookee, four bittee feelee, six bittee doee.”

“Really?” Six bits; that’s only seventy-five cents. “You wouldn’t get a white girl or a Mexican for less than a dollar,” says Blanche a little disapprovingly.

“Of course, the
mui jai
don’t see a cent of that. So much for the abolition of slavery,” adds Jenny, sardonic.

They’re heading east, without discussion, as if a glimpse of the Bay promises an evening breeze, though they should know better, thinks Blanche. A Chilean in a poncho walks right into her as if he doesn’t see her, almost knocking P’tit out of her arms. The baby doesn’t make a sound. He seems stunned by the colors and cries of the passing multitude. This is said to be the foreignest city in America; almost none of these people were born here. Back in Paris, Blanche remembers, there are so many protocols, so many ways to behave
comme il faut
, “as things are done,” because that’s how things have always been done. But San Francisco’s a roulette wheel, spinning its citizens and depositing them at random. Blanche has been driven around by cabbies who’ve claimed to be gentlemen temporarily down on their luck, and she’s spent well-paid nights with
michetons
who’ve boasted that they began as coal miners.

Jenny lifts her hat at a one-man band in faded stripes, who nods at her. He’s got pipes on a wire bracket around his neck, a fiddle in his hand, a large bass drum on his back. His elderly whine barely mounts over the skirmish of his instruments.

I’ll scrape the mountains clean, my boys
,

I’ll drain the rivers dry
,

A pocketful of rocks bring home—

So brothers don’t you cry!

No ears, curiously, just little nubs; it must be that you need only the holes to hear with. “I never saw anyone earless in Paris. I wonder why so many Americans are born that way,” remarks Blanche, jerking her thumb at him. “Something in the diet here?”

Jenny cackles.

“What?”

“That’s how they dealt with thieves back in the Rush. Miners hadn’t got time to spare for jurifying. Just lopped the guilty party’s ears off”—with a nod in the direction of the old musician—“and went back to panning.”

A year and a half here, Blanche thinks, disconcerted, and there’s so much she still doesn’t know about this country. The chorus fades behind them:

Oh, California
,

That’s the land for me!

I’m bound for San Francisco

With my washbowl on my knee
.

“This way,” says Jenny, suddenly ducking down Battery Street.

“Why?” asks Blanche, but she follows.

“Specials.” Jenny glances over her shoulder to check that the pair of private guards is going the other way.

It amuses Blanche to see Jenny even slightly rattled. “I thought it was only the cops who bother you—actual patrolmen.”

“Well, as a point of law, they’re the only ones with the power to arrest me,” mutters Jenny, “but Specials like to impress their employers and earn tips by rounding up riffraff and handing them over to the patrol.”

Her gray coat, waistcoat, pants, soft hat—they seem so ordinary to Blanche now, it’s hard to remember that Jenny’s wearing them constitutes a crime. “And it’s all worth the candle?”

“Come on,” Jenny groans, “don’t tell me you wouldn’t put up a fight if someone tried to make you swap your tight frills for a grain sack …” She tugs at Blanche’s mauve wrapper.

They pass an enormous organ on a cart: hundreds of pipes, and sinister-looking automata dancing on top to “The Ride of the Valkyries.” The grinder cranks on with his right arm, which Blanche notices is nearly twice the size of his left, and with barely a pause the tune changes jarringly to the Habanera from
Carmen
.

Then they’re going up a hill so steep she can’t talk and carry P’tit at the same time. She should be turning back soon. What if Arthur needs something? “I’m bushed,” she says at the top, panting, as she transfers P’tit to her other arm.

“Already? I like to stroll from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Mission and right over to the Panhandle, just to see what’s new,” says Jenny. “The City’s always growing like blazes, doubling every decade.”

Blanche finds the thought unsettling. “Sounds like some ugly fungus.”

“That’s the fun of it. Take the loveliest spot on earth,” says Jenny, arms out to encompass hill after hill, the Bay, the Pacific, “and scatter a litter of sooty old shacks all over it … It’s a striking contrast for the eye, wouldn’t you say? Then, for novelty, give the whole place the DTs.”

Blanche laughs, nodding. “There was a bad tremor back in January that woke me up.”

“You thought that little shimmy was bad?” Jenny crows. “Should have been here for the big one eight years back, when the City fell down around our ears. I’d been out on a bender, so I was half convinced I was seeing things. Cracks in walls opening and shutting like mouths … a four-story frontage dropped right off while I was watching.”

Blanche winces.

“Fires, too, every couple years. When our ship came in, in ‘51, the whole place was up in flames. Streets charring, fir planks curling up like snakes …”

“You make it sound like the time of your life,” Blanche objects.

Jenny dances from foot to foot. “Don’t everyone crave a little zest to make one day different from the last?”

“Not that much zest,” says Blanche. Thinking:
I liked my days the way they were, before everything changed
. After a minute, she asks, “Have you ever roamed farther afield?”

“Not too far yet,” admits Jenny with a touch of sheepishness. “Been to Sacramento once, though it was knee-deep in water at the time.”

“That would suit a swamp-wader like you,” jokes Blanche, letting P’tit slide down to her hip.

“‘Course, now that it’s the terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad, I hear Sacramento’s getting aspirations. They’re bringing Chinese in to build up the levees, filling in the old streets, moving everybody up to the second floor.”

“You’re pulling my leg.”

Jenny shakes her head. “Or if a building’s got only one story, they use screw jacks and winch the whole shebang fifteen feet into the air.” She’s distracted by something in a store window. An odd-looking shotgun lies right-angled, as if snapped in two, on a satin pillow with an engraved card:
The Long-Awaited Anson and Deeley Boxlock
. Tapping on the next window, Jenny remarks, “You could think of having him sit for a new photograph.”

Sometimes Jenny’s non sequiturs make Blanche’s head spin. Is this some kind of cruel joke about Arthur’s face?

“The kid, I mean.”

“Oh.” When she looks closer, she sees the display is headed
Infant Carte de Visites and Cabinet Cards
. Discomfited, Blanche looks down at P’tit.

“The picture beside your bed’s not much of a likeness anymore.”

“Maybe when he’s … grown a little,” says Blanche. The photographs behind the glass show fat, bland babies in embroidered gowns. Maybe once P’tit’s got some more hair to cover that protruding forehead, and a tooth or two, when he’s no longer so red and scaly …

“He’s bigger and stronger already,” says Jenny as they walk on. “You’re just too close up to notice.”

“He can’t do much more than flap around like a fish on dry land,” Blanche complains. “Sometimes I think he’ll never learn to crawl, even. I’ll be hauling him around like some millstone for the rest of my days.”

“Why’d you name him P’tit? Because he’s undersized?”

She shakes her head. “For his father—he’s really P’tit Arthur.” Saying Arthur’s name hurts her throat. Those bloodred blisters. “I was christened Adèle myself,” she adds. Only the small sensation—a coin dropping—alerts her to the fact that this is the first time she’s mentioned it to anyone in America. “Blanche was my circus name.”

“When did you switch?”

“On the ship.”

“Because America’s one big circus?”

That makes Blanche laugh.

“He smiled,” cries Jenny, pointing.

She examines P’tit’s pained face. “Probably just wind.”

Up ahead, the busy thoroughfare of Market Street slashes diagonally toward the docks. Blanche turns back west on Bush Street.

Jenny follows her, asking, “Why didn’t Arthur and Ernest change to their circus names too?”

“Maybe because it might be hard to get much respect down at the Exchange,” says Blanche, “going by Castor and Pollux.”

Jenny sniggers at that.

“They took the names from the pair of elephants at the Paris Zoo. Who got butchered when we were under siege by the Prussians,” Blanche adds regretfully.

Ernest insisted they should at least taste the original Castor and Pollux, as what he called a mark of respect, so he stood in line for hours and paid an appalling price for a slice. He and Arthur agreed that it was tough and oily, but Blanche wasn’t able to bring herself even to taste it, despite her hunger. Dog, cat, rat. That winter, Paris restaurants vied with one another to see who could serve them up in the most delectable sauces, defying the invaders.

“If you were all such toasts of the town back at your Cirque d’Hiver, what made you give it up and come over here?”

Machine-Kneaded Bread
, Blanche reads on a card in a storefront,
Guaranteed Free of Dangerous Perspiration
. “It was time for a change.”